I realise now that attempting to put into words what’s happening in Cradle’s trailer is impossible. It doesn’t allow for easy interpretation. The developers, Flying Cafe for Semianimals, are making a game with the sort of internal logic that defies simple analysis, raising unanswerable questions, in a Myst or Witness vibe, although Cradle does seem more connected to our world than either of those. There are some facts: it’s a first-person adventure game where you and a broken mechanical girl are left in an isolated yurt (tent thing) in the Mongolian hills. You’re putting her back together, hunting her body parts in the ruins of a nearby amusement park.
The video is fascinating and packed with detail: the world seems full of objects to manipulate, or scan with a futuristic magnifying glass. See, I already feel like that’s not doing it justice. That there’s so much more lurking, waiting to be uncovered in the colourful world and I’m far too removed from it. It reminds me of a happy Amnesia in a sunny Stalker. Watch.

“it’s a first-person adventure game where you and a broken mechanical girl are left in an isolated yurt (tent thing) in the Mongolian hills. You’re putting her back together, hunting her body parts in the ruins of a nearby amusement park.”

Uru (the spin-off from the main Myst story) is basically a first person point and click, but minus an inventory. The controls take some tweaking and/or getting used to though. Myst 5 is free-roam too from what I remember. It was gorgeous for the day too. This world was so pretty in motion: http://www.adventurecorner.de/games/myst5/screens/17.jpg

@parallel379
Wow, I’d totally forgotten about that. Now all I remember is something about a TV and a nodding bird…

Yeah, the complete chronicles which lets you explore the online areas in single player. To D’ni isn’t so great, but The Path of the Shell has my favourite age from any Myst game. At £10 it’s stupidly cheap these days for the amount of content in it.

OK, that mechanical lady is deeply creepy. You know those Oblivion/Skyrim mods that fill the world with dismembered lady corpses for you to…do things with? It’s like that. Computer games have a terribly nasty side. Unpleasant.

If you think i’m being all goodie two shoes, ask yourself why, in a design that is happy to go weird and abstract, the lady-bot is shaped liked a centrefold?

This is a shame as the game itself looks all sorts of MORE OF THIS SORT OF THING.

Thank you, I started to think I’m weird or something to notice this. This “robot lady” is not in a “that’s a robot and I’m working on it” position. The position is some sort of creepy worship position without arms. Eww. Too bad, the entire rest seems wonderful.

Yeah, I think it’s one of those where your goal is supposed to be suspect.

Also, I dunno, man, if I was trapped out in the steppes next to an abandoned amusement park with no one to judge me and I could build robots, well. I wouldn’t be building an ugly robot, that’s for sure.

Also, this instantly reminded me of ICO/Shadow of the Colossus.
Seem like you’re going to be utterly alone in Cradle, apart from your robot companion.
And his robot companion seems to be a substitute for a lost love, lost friend or something.

For one thing, I’m happy that objects in this game don’t (appear to) act like they’re made of the floaty bouncy material that seems to permeate all the objects in other games with physics engines (Half-Life 2, Fallout 3, Skyrim, you name it).

I’m also getting a Myst vibe from it, which is alright because I liked Myst. Can’t wait to play this.

Steppes don’t often appear in videogames. Meanwhile, i’m no stranger to them, and i do think they can be beautiful (at least as long as the grass is green, not sunburned and yellow). It’s not unexpected, seeing as developers are from Russia and Ukraine, but still good.

Really? I thought it was great. Avoid the uncanny valley by skipping the (inevitably inadequate) animation and just making it more abstract. I expected some lame Skyrim-style knife swinging and was pleasantly surprised at how elegant that looked.

Sounds a bit like Stalker as made by Ice Pick Lodge to me, just for something different (not the music though).
is it as survivalist as it looks? The ‘cutting up your own food and flower pressing’ sim of my dreams.

Even weirder: the same people who were oblivious to the ‘CONTOMINATION’ stinker were also capable of the cute and subtle wordplay seen on the flower-analysing machine at 2:17ish. You might need to watch full-screen to see it. Maybe ‘CONTOMINATION’ isn’t even a mistake; perhaps the apocalypse to which the story is post involves a man named Thomas and his uncontrollable toxic excretions…or something.

This looks several light years beyond anything else. It has the feel of real science-fiction (something that is almost extinct in this day and age). I am very impresed, hope the game is relased, is fun, and is successful commercially.

Semianimals Flying Amusement Park. Tech design is kinda eeh, similar to Stalker games in that aspect. Some of it can be remedied by just swapping all neon colors with warm or cool grays or something. Also, the font in the logo. Looking forward to it. Quite a bit actually.

was the, or an, art director for Stalker games. Check the art on there if you want to know where the grainy noisy look of these games originated. Stalker had the same bad contrast between most of the world and the sci-fi elements, it’s a mésalliance of art styles, pardon my French. Well, maybe they’ll figure it out until release.

I don’t know why you’d think that. I can think of few comparable examples of such expertly matched, naturalistic sci-fi design like those in Stalker. When you get to the weird parts in those labs they look like they were made by the same people that made everything else in there. To say nothing of the suits that are from some fictional “next year” adjustment of existing things to the Zone’s requirements.
Stalker is a master class of art direction.

Nope, not even close. Stalker is trashy and uneven, take it as my personal opinion. This is an issue of perceived authenticity or believability. And consistency. When you have ten thousand reference photos for one thing and just your imagination for the other, it’s natural that the second thing will come out looking less convincing. In this game’s case the authentic-looking part is the yurt, the various wacky electronics styled after the 1998 iMac are the part that looks like shit.

I will take it as your personal opinion and restate mine for no real reason. (although I do think it can be actually argued that Stalker’s design continuity is very strong).
Stalker is solid as a rock. There’s no ‘alien’ design elements. Everything comes from the world its in and matches in pretty much every way. Even the weird stuff is drawn from the surroundings and its styles. This kind of thing is as rusty and down to earth as everything else, despite being very strange indeed. Very few games would do this. They would rather make something entirely new from whole cloth. Which is fine, but this particular artistry is a big part of what makes Stalker unique.

And these guys are doing it again, very well if you ask me. The strange skyrail apparatus look like they’re made from the same sorts of fixtures modern rail systems are. Like an iteration on the present instead of some flight of fancy and then rendered with great naturalism (and honestly I don’t think you’ve ever seen a 1998 iMac based on that remark). This is a very intelligent and subtle style of design.

Cradle is a science-fiction first-person quest with freedom of movement. The story is built around the relations of the protagonist and a mechanical girl, who by enigmatic circumstances find themselves together in a yurt among the desert Mongolian hills. The player is to restore the lost functions of his companion’s mechanical body parts and together reveal the mystery of the neglected entertainment park found not far from the yurt.

Watched it and was amazed on the level of detail in that gert (yurt, as you say). Showed it to my (mongolian) girlfriend and she was even more amazed. The patterns on the wood, the implements, the tea-pots. Someone has done their homework with that location.